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How to Choose the Best Keywords for Your Website

Author: Luke Thorn,
WebRefresh Founder

Luke Thorn is WebRefresh founder and SEO expert. Luke believes that understanding your audience and consistently developing a targeted brand and web presence is essential for success online. His company WebRefresh is based on Sydney's Northern Beaches and specialises in SEO and web design.

How to choose the best keywords for your website

So you want to get your SEO happening, get those juicy organic Google search rankings, outrank your competitors, and convert your search traffic into paying customers, subscribers, ad revenue or all of the above? Great! You’ve come to the right blog post to choose the perfect keywords for your website.

The first step you’re going to need to take in order to achieve all of the above is to choose the right keywords and there’s certainly a process to it – it’s called keyword research!

In this post Luke Thorn from WebRefresh is going to share the practical process for developing your keyword ideas, finding your keyword opportunities and assessing the value of all of your keywords so that you end up with a highly valuable list of keywords for targeting on your site!

Sound good? Let’s get into it!

The 5 Essential Keyword Research Steps

Step #1 – Keyword Brainstorming

Write down all the keywords you think your ideal customers might be searching for. If you have multiple services or products then you will want to create a list of keyword for each product or service.

Step #2 – Traffic Research

Now that you have a few keyword ideas, it’s time to figure out if anyone is actually searching for for those keywords. We can find out by using kwfinder.com*, an online tool that allows you to upload a list of keyword and returns a whole heap of useful related keywords and stats and based on your original keywords. The stats you’ll be able to get from KW finder include:

Trend:

The trend graph shows us the average monthly trend for a specific keyword over the last 12 months – this helps you to see the seasonality for a specific keyword.

You can see that the keyword ‘Wedding Hairstyles’ (shown below) is highly seasonal.

Search:

This stat shows the average monthly search volume for a specific keyword over the last 12 months.

CPC:

The CPC stat shows the average Cost Per Click for this keyword in Google Adwords.

KD (Keyword Difficulty):

*Special note: I am a registered affiliate with KW Finder and receive a small commision if you sign up to the tool. That being said, in my opinion, KW Finder really is the easiest and most accessible keyword research tool on the market right now.

Step #3 – Competition Research

KW finder makes it incredibly easy to see who your competitors are in search results for any given keyword by showing the search results on the right hand side right next to the keyword results. In the example below we can see the SERP competition for the keyword ‘Wedding Hairstyles’ see example below:

Keyword idea:

SERP competition for ‘Wedding Hairstyles’:

The stats for this keyword tells us it’s got some pretty fierce competition! To find out what each stat means, just hover over the little question mark icons in the first row of the SERP table.

You can find out how your own domain or page stacks up against the competition by clicking the ‘Analyze SERP’ button at the bottom of the table:

Then you can enter your page URL in the comparison tool to get a side by side view of your domain stats vs the competition:

Step #4 – Keyword Prioritisation

Now you want to set up a spreadsheet where you prioritise the keywords you want to target based on traffic, competition and depending on the current or estimated future strength of your own page based on your PA and DA metrics and the number and quality of links you think you will be able to build to those pages:

Step #5 – Keyword Mapping

Once you’ve sussed out your competition for each keyword and chosen the keywords you think have the best search volume and are the most relevant you then want to match up each keyword to a page on your website. To help you do this you can use our preformatted keyword mapping template

Now – If you don’t already have pages that are highly relevant for each keyword you want to target, then I highly recommend creating an optimised landing page or blog post for each.

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